We consider the problem of estimating individual and social welfare in congestion games where travelers have asymmetric access to information about incidents on network links. We propose a new Bayesian congestion game to model the heterogeneity in the travelers’ access to traffic information, and study the equilibrium structure as the fraction of better-informed players (or highly-informed travelers) increases. Our results suggest that the better information improves individual welfare, but the value of information is zero after a certain threshold fraction of highly informed travelers. Moreover, under a broad range of parameters, there exist another threshold (lower than the first threshold) after which increasing the relative fraction of highly informed travelers does not reduce aggregate social costs.
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